The silence was killing her.

"What do you think?" Gabi asked, a little anxiously, wringing her hands, her leg bouncing, the nervous energy that had built up inside her now desperate to find its way out, by any means necessary.

In some ways she'd been dreading this. This article - the article - had been the impetus for everything, really. It was the excuse she'd used to search for her birth mother properly, was the reasoning she'd given her accounting department for all those invoices for gas and hotel stays in Albany and orders for official documents. The article was what had brought her to Olivia's door, and though so much had happened since Gabi first walked into Olivia's office, though her life had been changed in so many profound ways that the article itself seemed insignificant, she was always meant to write it. There had been others, over the past few weeks, detailed accounts of the failings of the state's adoption system in the past and the ways the government was working to overcome those failings, details of other people's stories, other people's searches. The last one had been about Gabi's own search, an in-depth examination of the journey she'd undertaken to find this piece of her own past. But this one, this one was the one. The big one. The one that tied it all together. The article that would explain what exactly Gabi had found when she found her mother, what Gabi had learned, the story that would tie the threads from all the other articles - the concepts of self, and family, and how those were defined, and government oversight and human imperfection and what it all meant - into a neat little bow. This was the final say, the thesis of the entire fucking project, the most important article Gabi would ever write.

There was so much she couldn't say, in that article. She had decided against revealing that her birth mother was an NYPD captain; there weren't that many women who held that rank, and probably there were even fewer - if any at all - who had adopted little boys after traumatic cases. It wouldn't be that hard for someone in the know to piece it together, and that could make things difficult for Olivia at work. This story was private, even if Gabi meant to share it with the entire city, so Olivia's name and occupation were not included. Also not included were the gory details of Gabi's own conception; she had to mention the conversation about her father, the conversation about Olivia's father and Noah's father, too, but she kept her father's name and the fact that he was a famous rapist to herself for Olivia's sake, as well. That he existed was his only relevance to the story; his personal infamy was of no interest to Gabi. She damn sure couldn't mention Elliot, Olivia's…whatever he was. Soulmate. Red string of fate fucking kryptonite. The one who'd broken her and healed her both, the fixed point in the center of Olivia's life. Gabi only barely understood Olivia's connection to Elliot herself, and she was certain she couldn't do that story justice, anyway, no matter how important she felt it was to the overall narrative of family weaved throughout the article.

Despite all the omissions, she felt she'd done well. There was perhaps very little that was new or revelatory about the conclusions she'd drawn, about her final statement on family as something that was a lot about choice, and a lot about love, and only a little about blood. Other people had said it before, some of them more eloquently than Gabi could ever hope to do. But at this moment in time, in a world that felt so wildly changed from what it once had been, when so many people found themselves unmoored, when almost no one felt any sort of connection to the Rockwellian vision of familial security, it felt important to her to say it. It felt important to say we can build something better than what we were given. It felt important to say that to Olivia.

And so she was here, sitting on the sofa in Olivia's scrupulously neat apartment, holding her breath as she watched her mother finish reading the final draft of the article, as she awaited Olivia's judgment. The article was about Olivia, but it was for her, too, and Gabi wanted, more than anything else, for Olivia to like it. She wanted her mother to be proud of her.

"It's beautiful, sweetheart," Olivia said earnestly, passing back the tablet Gabi had given her to read the draft. "I think you've done very well."

Those were words of praise, but it somehow was not enough. Not that Gabi was ungrateful, or anything, but given the sheer amount of time and effort she'd put in, the sheer number of earth shattering revelations she had encountered along the way, she'd been sort of hoping for more than beautiful. It wasn't the lyricism of her prose or the logic of her arguments that concerned her; she wanted to know how it made Olivia feel.

"Are you really ok with me putting all this out there?" she asked. "I know it can be…difficult to see your own life in print."

Lots and lots of people were going to read this story. Thousands of people, hundreds of thousands, maybe more, were going to walk around for the rest of their lives with the details of Olivia's teenage pregnancy and the resultant fallout from it in their memories. A story, once told, ceased to be the sole property of the storyteller, or indeed the story's subjects; once a story had been shared it belonged to the audience, and they would make of it what they wished, maybe interpreting it the way the author intended, maybe not, maybe finding something in it the author had never known was there at all, and once the article went to print neither Gabi nor Olivia would have any say in how the story of their lives would be received. It would become a living, breathing thing, outside their control.

"It does feel a little…weird," Olivia allowed carefully. "I'm not…I haven't shared a lot of this with anyone else."

Gabi knew that already; her mother was an intensely private person, not one to reach for the limelight, prone to keeping secrets, no matter how the keeping of them might wound her. Olivia was a woman who had devoted her life to the service of others, allowing herself to take a backseat to their needs, their troubles, her own buried down deep. The public lancing of a private wound must surely be a new experience for her, Gabi thought, but then again there had been all those articles in the wake of Lewis's attack, interviews on the evening news preserved forever on YouTube. It wasn't Olivia's first rodeo, in that regard.

"But I think it matters," Olivia continued decisively. "I think a lot of people might recognize themselves in your story, and I think it's good for them to see it. To see that…maybe everything wasn't perfect, you know, but that doesn't mean it was bad. We have to…I think it helps us to be honest. Nobody has a perfect life. Nobody makes all the right choices. Sometimes we don't ever know if the choice we made was right. And that's ok. That's worth saying."

"Do you think you made the right choice?" Gabi asked before she could stop herself.

Choices, that was the heart of everything, really. Olivia had chosen to have her baby, knowing she couldn't keep it. She'd chosen to obey her mother's commands, instead of running away, chosen to give her baby up. And she'd chosen to take Noah, when he was offered to her, and she'd chosen to get to know Gabi when she just as easily could have kept that door closed, and she'd chosen to open her arms to Elliot, even though he'd hurt her. Gabi had chosen to find her mother, and pursue her, had made the choice to make Olivia part of her family, introduce her to the girls and to Nat, and not keep her at arm's length. The past was littered with choices, but it all went back to that very first one.

"Elliot and I talked about that, not too long ago," Olivia mused. "We're about the same age. I was seventeen when I got pregnant with you, and Elliot was seventeen when Kathy got pregnant. We didn't know each other, but we were in the same boat at the same time. His oldest was born just a few months before you. Maureen."

That surprised Gabi; she hadn't realized that Elliot and Olivia shared this secret in common, and her head was spinning.

"Elliot and Kathy are Catholic, and they had each other, and they decided to get married. He went into the Marines to support their family, and they stayed together until Kathy died. I was all by myself, and I decided to give you up. We were in the same situation - sort of - but we made different choices. And ultimately…ultimately I think we both did the right thing for our families. Elliot and Kathy, they were good together."

Gabi wondered how much it cost her, to say those words out loud.

"And you and I…if I'd kept you, I don't know what would have happened to us. But I don't think it would have been good. This way you were safe. You were cared for. You had everything you needed."

"And you had a chance to build a better life."

It wasn't like Olivia could have done what Elliot had done, settled down and joined the military for the money and the job security. She didn't have anyone else to rely on, just her mother, a volatile drunk. Where could she have gone, what could she have done, under those circumstances? What if Serena had made good on her threat, and thrown Olivia out?

Olivia's smile was soft, and sad, and knowing.

"I'm glad you're in it, now," she said.

"Me, too," Gabi told her earnestly.

"But, sweetheart…we haven't talked about this," Olivia continued, a little hesitantly. "Do you…I mean, I understand either way, but…do you want to meet your father?"

A chill raced down Gabi's spine and the word no formed in the back of her throat on reflex. No, she did not want to meet Burton Lowe. The man was cruel, and a coward, a manipulator, a very low sort of monster who had done untold damage. He'd taken advantage of Olivia when she was little more than a child, and abandoned her, and returned as an adult only to hurt her again when the truth of his sins came to light. When this journey began Gabi had gone in search of her mother wanting to know the story of her blood, wanting to know what secrets lurked in her veins, what traits, what traumas, what faults, what glories she had inherited. She had believed, on some level, that in finding Olivia she would find her self. And in some ways she had, just not in the ways she expected. It was Olivia who had shown her that they shared the same face but not the same heart, that who Gabi was was down to Gabi, and not her blood. Burton, he was in her blood, but he was never gonna be her family, not the way Olivia was, and that had nothing to do with genetics and everything to do with the choices they had made.

"No," she said. "I don't…I don't think I need to, honestly. I'm not interested in anything he has to say, and I don't want him in my life." Not like I want you there, she thought.

"Ok," Olivia said. "I won't push you on it. But I feel…guilty, just a little. I know who he is and what he's done and I'm not going to forgive him for that, but he doesn't know he has a daughter. I've often wondered if I should have told him. When he came back, before everything went to shit, he and I were…getting along. It was nice. And I thought about telling him. I thought, you know, all this time had gone by, and I'd never met you, I thought you were gone for good, and I thought we could…I don't know. Reminisce, maybe. Grieve together for what might have been. I wanted to tell him, but the time was never right, and then everything fell apart, and part of me was glad he didn't know. That I didn't have to share you with him. Maybe that's selfish."

"I think that's human," Gabi said, trying to sound reassuring, but then another thought occurred to her. "Would you have wanted to meet your father?"

Olivia's father the rapist, the stranger in the dark who had shattered her mother's whole world. It wasn't exactly the same; Olivia had known Burton, loved him in the way only a scared seventeen year old could do, but Serena had not known the man who raped her. Burton was his own kind of insidious, but he wasn't that. Yet the similarities were there, just the same, and that was going to trouble Gabi for the rest of her life, the way the circumstances of her own birth were so like Olivia's, the damage that must have done to Olivia's heart.

"Yes," Olivia said, without hesitation. "Not knowing who he was…that was torture, for a long time. I spent years trying to find him. And when I finally did, I just wanted to see his face. I wanted to look into his eyes. I wanted him to know what he'd done. I wanted him to take some kind of accountability for it. But he killed himself before I got the chance."

Jesus.

"He knew about me, though. He cut my picture out of the newspaper. He told his wife he had a daughter. He called me his daughter. He wanted to claim me but he didn't want me enough to ever speak to me. Maybe he thought I'd hate him."

"Do you?"

"No," Olivia said sadly. "I did, for a long time. I hated him. But now...I don't know. It's complicated. I don't know that I'll ever really know how I feel about him."

"That's how I feel, too," Gabi decided. "I don't…I don't know what it is. I don't know if I'll ever know what it is. But right now, I don't want to know him. Right now I have you, and I have my family, and I'm happy with that."

"Good," Olivia said, reaching out to rest a gentle hand on her shoulder. "I just want you to be happy."

"I want that for you, too, you know."

It was hard to know, really, if Olivia was happy. She'd made a good life for herself; a stellar career, a sweet son she adored, Elliot back in her life - in her bed, if what Noah said was true - and she'd been so full of joy when she met her granddaughters. She had friends and a comfortable home and the horrors of the past were far removed, now. When they'd first met Gabi had sensed such a sorrow in Olivia, but it seemed that these days her shoulders were a little straighter, her steps a little lighter. Maybe Gabi just wanted that to be true.

"I think I am," Olivia said. "It took a long time to get here but…yeah. I think…I think this is what happiness is."

There was really no other choice in that moment, nothing else that Gabi wanted to do, could even think of doing; she set the tablet down on the coffee table, and then she reached out, and embraced her mother. She buried her face in Olivia's soft hair, and felt Olivia's arms wrap around her, and they sat like that for a long, long time, holding on to one another. Happy, at last.